Wednesday, April 6, 2011

White Sands Yucca

One of the nice things about raw capture is that you can always go back later and redo your images using more modern processing tools. We have a very large print of an image I took on a family vacation to the South at White Sands National Monument hanging on our wall. It is a gorgeous image of a yucca in the white dunes in my not so humble opinion but color wise I always thought it was duller than we experienced the moment which was quite magical with gorgeous warm sunset light playing over the dunes and ripples in the sand. This turned the shadow areas on the white sand a gorgeous blue. Neither comes out very good in the print. So I dug up the harddrive that these older images are stored on and fired up Lightroom which has the references in its database to these older images. Typed in White Sands in the search box and poof there the images were. They were of course done in the old process in Lightroom and I was using the Adobe Standard profile. Users of Lightroom may know that this usually leads to dull color. Switching to the new process extracted significantly more detail, turning on automatic CA correction also helped, but mostly the image was helped by selecting the landscape profile for the camera. I also upped the exposure compensation a little, making the image more high key as appropriate. Exported the three photographs to 16-bit ppRGB tiff and stitched them in hugin. Below is the result as uploaded to flickr

The same yucca image (cropped differently) in the older treatment is here. The same cropping in the older treatment is on smugmug here, which is the print we have on our wall. I'll probably replace the smugmug image sometime soon with the new higher quality image. Even though it was a few years ago, this image feels much more like the experience we had trolling on the dunes that evening.